MY MUSEOLOGY

Awesome tranquillity pervaded my experience of the sculpture park at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, set on the coast of the Øresund in northern Zealand with views of Sweden just over the narrow stretch of water and the comfort of the museum's modernist embrace behind. Pieces by Moore, Arp, Miró and a host of others snatched my attention and breath as I trod soft thick grass and asked myself unconsciously which ways to turn and explore. This tranquillity was a singular experience, musing on which I have been inspired to think some more about curating and the purpose of an art museum. With the rise of the modern museology over recent decades refracting the view of our historical and artistic expository institutions, I am struck particularly by how much the contemporary museum is supposed to serve as a multimodal space to fit a host of purposes and reflect the diverse interests and motivations of current and potential audiences. What Louisiana showed me, however, is that--properl...

Remembering too well engenders sadness, in which case the nearly two-year absence here ought to be lamentable. In fact I'm glad to see when, what, and how I last wrote here. For it represents a productive history, the beginning of something that can only be resumed, not undone, and it permits a brief meditation on  the feeling of seeing something of my own history unchanged in the knowledge that, while lives can be measured by the strictures of our formalisations of time (or our concessions to it), the multiplicity of my experiences and the evident continuation of my history in spite of the absence of a centralised discursive record of it frees us from over-organised perspectives on ourselves, what we've done, who we've been, and what that says about who we are. This, then, is the collapsing of a twenty-or-so-month caesura, a reconciliation of an extraneously qualified shortfall. Gently does it nudge us, too, towards thinking about history and now, and about museums as st...